“Surveillance critics confront Obama in Oval Office”

[deurbano]

http://www.sfgate.com/news/politics/article/Obama-meeting-with-lawmakers-on-NSA-surveillance-4700291.php#page-1

By JOSH LEDERMAN, Associated Press
Updated 3:24 pm, Thursday, August 1, 2013

<<WASHINGTON (AP) — Struggling to salvage a massive surveillance program, President Barack Obama was confronted by congressional critics of the National Security Agency's collection of Americans' telephone records Thursday as snowballing concerns made new limitations on the intelligence effort appear increasingly likely.

Obama invited lawmakers on both sides of the issue to an Oval Office meeting designed to stem the bleeding of public support and show Obama was serious about engaging. Among the participants were the NSA's most vigorous congressional supporters — the top Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate intelligence panels — alongside its most stern critics, including Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado….

Wyden, in an interview, said he and Udall had sought to convince Obama of the urgency of addressing rising concerns. He said he proposed strengthening the government's ability to get emergency authorization to collect an individual's phone records, so that pre-emptive collection of everyone's records would no longer be necessary.

"I felt that the president was open to ideas — and we're going to make sure he has some," Wyden said after returning to Capitol Hill.
Wyden and two Senate colleagues also unveiled legislation Thursday to overhaul the secret federal court that oversees the programs, which critics decry as largely a rubber stamp. The senators aim to make the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court more adversarial by creating a special advocate who could argue for privacy during closed-door proceedings and appeal decisions. A companion bill would diversify the court's bench by ending the chief justice's sole authority to pick its judges...

Debate over the line between counterterrorism and invasion of privacy has been heating up since former government contract systems analyst Edward Snowden leaked classified documents exposing the NSA's monumental capability to sweep up data about phone and Internet use, including programs that store years of phone records on virtually every American. Snowden's revelations have prompted a national rethinking over government surveillance powers that have grown since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks….

The more information about the programs the government has released, the more it has fed even greater concerns about the scope of the surveillance and whether Obama's national security team has been truthful in describing it publicly in the past.

After the administration on Wednesday declassified more documents about an email mining program, Wyden said they showed the government had "repeatedly made inaccurate statements to Congress" about the effectiveness in countering terrorism. And new details released about the phone records program created new fodder for critics by confirming for the first time that, when investigating one suspected terrorist, the government can also examine records of people who called people who called the targeted individual — netting millions of people's records in a single request….

The White House also was spooked by a House vote last week to dismantle the program. The vote failed, but by a narrow 217-205 margin that underscored the unusual and strong political coalition of Libertarian-leaning conservatives and liberal Democrats who are finding common cause is demanding changes to the surveillance. >>

[RC]

1. If we would not be interfering in the affairs of so many other countries, killing families by remote

control, thereby making more terrorists we "have to fight" to somehow protect our National Security, even though the families terrorist we kill are in their own country and have no way to harm us.
We are running around like a crack addled bully antagonizing everyone else. For those actually paying attention, the rest of the world is getting fed up. This will not end well for us. Not at all.
One of the first things we need to do is stop doing is spying on everybody like some well to do, paranoid mental case. We also need to learn to leave other countries alone. Stop stirring things up in those other countries and then arming one side or both sides in the resulting conflict.

Don't agree? Visualize any of several other countries invading our country and doing anything we are doing to them. Building military bases. Using drones to blowup whomever they decide are terrorists, in a neighborhood near you. Then coming back and blowing up the rescuers. Imprison people off the street, without any charges and torture them, for whatever reason, because they looked like someone. The list goes on and on and on...

[deurbano]

2. I agree.

For the presumed sake of preventing "terrorism," we commit actions that can only achieve the opposite result. As you say, if we just put ourselves in the position of those who are experiencing (and whose children are experiencing) our "war on terror" first hand-- far away from any threat to OUR well being (or the well being of OUR children)-- we would understand what is REALLY being accomplished in our name.

[Uncle Joe]

3. Precisely and that shouldn't be difficult for people to figure out

but for some it's "rocket science."

The world is not our video game.